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Craig Venter imagines a world with printable life forms

October 18, 2012

Bioprinter (credit: Organovo)

Craig Venter imagines a future where you can download software, print a vaccine, inject it, and presto! Contagion averted.

“It’s a 3-D printer for DNA, a 3-D printer for life,” Venter said at the inaugural Wired Health Conference in New York City, Wired Science reports.

The geneticist and his team of scientists are already testing out a version of his digital biological converter, or “teleporter.”

Why should you care? Well, because the machine has “really good anti-viral software,” he quipped.

His team is working through scenarios where they have less than 24 hours to make a new vaccine with this gadget.

He recalled working with Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009. They couldn’t get the virus out of the metropolis because authorities wouldn’t allow it, he said. That delayed efforts to stem the spread of the virus, and thousands of people died.

Had they been able to digitize it, they could have e-mailed it, and “it could have gone around the world digitally,” allowing researchers to study it and to build a vaccine more quickly, Venter said. …

Comments (9)

Now Craig Venter can engineer retroviruses that will encode his name into your DNA. Wouldn’t that be fun? I’m being half facetious and half dreadfully serious.

Not to mention, instead of introducing new species to isolated islands which result in the extermination of various species and the degradation or destruction of the local ecosystems therein, we will be able to introduce completely alien lifeforms into the global environment which can multiply, mutate, and lead to UNKNOWN consequences and a potential global, cascading, ecosystem failure…and by design, either wittingly or unwittingly. I’ve never seen such a clearly dubious proposition. We had better develop elegant simulations of the global environment so that we can test these creations before bringing them into reality.

I hope someone solves and provides publically availabile mind uploading soon, so that we can at least be able jettison our biological bodies in order to assume artificial ones whenever our environment becomes toxic with our biological “duct tape” solutions to complex problems.

There is a silver lining: this could be the “grey goo” that leads to the expedited development of advanced general artificial intelligence (Singularity). That may be the only thing that could clean up such a mess if we ever came to that point.

It certainly will help bio terrorism. Think of all those science fiction movies, where the mad scientist mixes up some concoction, drinks it, and then turns into something unexpected. This could really make that a reality. It’s kind of like making a nuclear bomb, in a do it yourself kit.

I’m amazed by all this 3D printer stuff. It’s kind of like computers and can do anything. Could you 3D print a computer program too? You would need to print the electrons in silicon memory locations that held the program. So then 3D printers could replace computers too. It’s almost like you have an anything at all creator.